The 2021 Honorary Editor, Dr Julien Louys of Griffith University, published a strong defence of regional journals like the
Proceedings in his Editorial Foreword to Volume 129: "The science reported in the following pages represents strong observational data, rigorous interpretations, and discourse that will resonate well beyond the state. Nevertheless, there is a wide-ranging perception, increasingly common across universities and funding bodies, that science should only be published in flashy, high-profile, or international publications. Unfortunately, excellent publications such as the
Proceedings are not seen as desirable or even worthwhile venues to submit science. It has even reached the point where academics have been actively discouraged from publishing in more local or regional journals, being informed that such publications would detract from their professional records... "Such journals provide one of the few remaining outlets for purely local or small-scale scientific observations. This scale may be small from a topical or geographical perspective but can be enormous from a scientific perspective. The grand narratives, the meta-analyses, and the increasingly popular ‘big data’ driven research agendas do not occur in isolation but critically rely on local observations and smaller-scale studies… "The
Great Barrier Reef, one of the natural wonders of the world…is composed of thousands of individual reefs, each in turn composed of billions of coral polyps, each building on the structures left by previous polyps. In much the same way do scientific contributions build upon one another, dependent on the small, local and (according to some) seemingly insignificant outputs." == Special issues ==